CEO Grab VN nói về bài toán cân bằng lợi ích của người dùng và đối tác

We think there's a significant opportunity, and especially with a footprint like ours in terms of the number of drivers that are on the road, the number of kilometers that they put on the road, we must focus on this and we will continue to build a focus. But as you say, in Vietnam in particular, the market is still very new. In the meantime, we are already running pilots so that we can understand the value of EV, understand the challenges that driver partners face today with current EVs available, and that way we can use that as a feedback loop for the partners that we work with and eventually to help to convince driver partners to get on the wagon and start to shift to EV. We have a truly super app experience that touches so many different touch points in your daily life. Building that is not easy, it's not cheap, so some may aspire to do that and I welcome them to try, but it takes a lot to put that together.

Hi, I'm Alejandro from Grab Vietnam. Glad to meet you, Ali.

I'm having a lovely day. Weather's not so great, but it's really nice to be here and meet with you and share a little bit about Grab, a little bit less about myself, hopefully as well.

I hope so.

About five months now.

The five months has gone very quickly, I have to say, especially with Tet just kind of accelerates the year. I'd say I'm feeling more adapted now. Definitely the first few months is always painful when you move to a new country, and I kind of enjoy that pain, that's why I've lived in many different countries. You're outside of your comfort zone and so on. So I spent a lot of time really familiarizing myself with the city, just roaming around, eating a lot, seeing how people live. And on the business side, it's mostly about listening in the first few months, so trying to understand. I understand Grab very well because of my long history with Grab, but understanding how Grab operates in this market, what kind of challenges we have, what opportunities we have, how people uniquely use technology here, is really that first few months. And then I can layer on my own perspective. So I'd say right now I feel really well adapted. I'm very happy that we have a really good leadership team and they've helped me to really understand the market in a much faster way than I could have without them. So yeah, I feel really good, really confident about the rest of the year.

In some ways, I would say there's a lot of consistency at Grab. Generally speaking, internally we have a really unique and consistent culture, and that I see parallels in both Thailand and Vietnam actually. So I'd say first of all, we're very privileged that we've been lucky enough to attract some of the best talent in both markets. And when I say best, I don't just mean people with high skill, but people with care as well, people with creativity. And I'm always really inspired by the people that I surround myself with, and that was the case in Thailand and it's the case here as well. In terms of how we operate, both markets we're not very hierarchical, we're very focused on going on the ground, rolling up our sleeves. I think the difference for me is just understanding the Vietnamese market, understanding the mindset of the Vietnamese people, and how we can serve them uniquely here.

A few, I would say. One that comes to mind for me really is Thailand had a very huge growth spurt during the COVID pandemic, and a lot of that came from what we call expansion cities outside of Bangkok. And I see a similar opportunity here, but it's sort of a little bit further in the future than it was in Thailand. The opportunity is still ahead of us here. We have a very big focus in what we call the expansion markets. The tech awareness, tech savviness, the understanding about how our verticals and our services might work is still quite low. So it's a unique challenge here because it will take a lot of time and effort and a lot of good groundwork and execution to get that message through, to drive the awareness. But the opportunity size is actually very significant. We have to have a strong feedback loop to understand how users think, and very uniquely in Vietnam, there's such vast difference regionally in cultural preferences and so on. So understanding that, leveraging our teams on the ground so that we can give them the right relevant solutions, is very important.

First of all, I did not build Grab Thailand myself. I think we have a great team in both countries that has really, what I always say, turned challenge into opportunity. So the COVID pandemic was very challenging for us and extremely stressful, I cannot stress that enough. But it created so many opportunities for us to innovate, for us to launch new services, reprioritize, and so on. So the way that I see it is we have the right relevant services that really touch many different points of your daily life. If you think about it, whether you're moving around or you're hungry or you need your groceries delivered to you, you need to make payments, we have those solutions for you at every different time of day. But adoption is still quite low in the market. So my ambition is to really turn us into a true everyday use case for users nationwide. That means more people using more of our services, and in more geographies as well. And that's really the right ambition for us, especially when you think about the timing in this market, that Vietnam is on the cusp of something really incredible.

I can't talk about the contribution, but what I can say is that Vietnam is a very key market for us. And the reason is that we see it not just based on the business that we have today, but the business potential for the future. We've been here for nine years. A lot of investment in terms of people, resources has gone into building not just Grab Vietnam but the digital economy in Vietnam as well. So we continue to have that long-term commitment to the market. Our leadership team are very big believers that there is huge opportunity here because when you think about the demographics of the market, it's the fastest growing economy in Southeast Asia, huge young population that's mobile first, growing middle class. That's a very interesting proposition for us. That's exactly the target customer base that we're looking for. So there's a big commitment from them. That's why they asked me to come to Vietnam. That's an investment as well, to take me out of the market where I was operating and bring my experience here and try to find ways where we can take the learnings from Thailand and the nuances from Vietnam and combine those together to drive the next wave of growth.

I think that first of all, we came at a time when none of these industries existed, and we put a lot of time and effort into developing that. Back to the days when people had to convince a taxi driver to use a smartphone to get on an app. That was the level of effort it took to build this. Huge amounts of money have gone into developing the tech, into building robust operations in the country that serves so many different business types. So I think the traction has been very strong. When you walk around the city, you'll see Grab quite frequently, and that is a good marker that users, whether it's a consumer or a driver partner or a merchant partner, have really caught on and seen the value in what we can do. Potential competitors have seen that too, and so I think it's very natural to see different companies, whether it's a local startup or another international player, want to enter and participate in this space. I think the good thing is that really the true competition for all of us should be how do we grow the market, because the penetration is still very low. So it's natural to expect that over time we might see more competitors coming in, we might see some competitors dropping out. This is not an easy business to operate in, especially once you enter the super app realm, because the complexity multiplies. The need to have seamless tech for every service that we offer and really lean operations behind the scenes so that we can manage this at scale is very difficult to do. So I think that the competitive landscape will continue to be vibrant, it will continue to evolve because the industry is still relatively new. There's more than enough room for any of us to play.

Firstly, I think what's very interesting in the food delivery side is this was a business that came much later after ride-hailing. And why was that? Because we already had a very significant user base, we had a driver community of Grab Bike and Grab Car drivers that were already there and readily available. So there was a really interesting opportunity to leverage those drivers to add new services to offer to users, and in exchange the driver partners had more opportunity to earn greater income. So that was really the dawn of food delivery for us. COVID fast-tracked it. The interesting thing is that emerging out of COVID, we continue to see traction and growth, which shows that even though people are leaving home, they're going and dining out again, they're returning to their pre-COVID lives, the habit that was created by the convenience and the choice that food delivery offers continues to remain. So I think that the food delivery landscape will continue to evolve. For us, we hear what users say they want: affordability and selection. And those are two things that we really focus on. In particular, in these uncertain economic times, affordability is a really big focus for us. So we think that if we focus on driving new solutions, new services, or new ways to order that can bring your costs down as a consumer, we can continue to grow that business over time. And that's the traction that we're seeing now. We have great co-funding schemes with merchant partners, for instance, where we bring some value that Grab invests, and in exchange if the merchant partner has confidence that they might get a return, they also invest some value there as well to drive additional value and discounting for the user. These are really important ways for us to not just continue to hold on to the COVID volumes but really to unlock further growth despite challenging economic times. So I think the food delivery market is here to stay.

It depends on how you see competition. So I don't think of us as a food delivery player. I see us as a part of a greater food industry. So everybody eats at least three times a day, I've sometimes eaten more than three times a day. Our penetration into people's meals is still very low, and that's the true competition: how do you compete with someone dining in at home? So I think there's still so much room for all of us to continue to grow. Yes, there are a number of players in the market, we each try and carve out our own unique value proposition, and it really comes down to that. Those that will survive need to have the right fundamentals, they need to have the right cost efficiency and agility to adapt to evolving needs. And so if they can do that, if they can carve out a unique value proposition for themselves, I think they have an opportunity to grow with the market as well.

I don't think I can answer that. I think the term super app can sound very appealing, but there's the label and there's actually doing it, and they're two very different things. We can truly say that based on the services that we've been rolling out over the years with a very long-term commitment and long-term vision, we have a truly super app experience that touches so many different touch points in your daily life. Building that is not easy, it's not cheap. So some may aspire to do that and I welcome them to try, but it takes a lot to put that together. It's not easy. I think there's room for someone to have a single use case or someone to try to be a super app, but for us I know that it's our secret sauce actually, because it drives better loyalty, better frequency from users when they see us as a one-stop shop to meet a lot of their essential needs. In fact, I sometimes think of it as utility. You must eat, you must move around, and so whenever you think of those very critical, consistent daily use cases, there's only one app in the market that can serve all of those needs. And so for us, it's definitely a key value.

We are very focused on our core services, I would say. This year we think that there's still a lot of untapped potential there in terms of both driving more adoption from new users but also getting existing users that are using maybe one or two services to adopt other services that we offer. So there's a lot of potential there alone. I think we think of our strategy in four pillars. The first is we leverage the super app ecosystem. What that means to us is that we have a very significant user base, some are using one service, some two. There's an opportunity there to learn from them and hyper-localize the offering depending on where they are, but also cross-sell services between them, drive stickiness and loyalty over the long term. The second pillar is operational efficiency. Because we are the market leader and we are operating at scale, but this market evolves very quickly and we must stay agile. So we must have very efficient operations that allow us to reprioritize and to jump ahead of trends as they come. The third pillar for us, especially in this really uncertain economic climate, is affordability. So in our mobility services, for instance, we focus on having better pricing, lower fares, especially now coming out of the pandemic where the supply of available driver partners has improved. That translates into better pricing for our users. And on top of that, we launch new services like GrabCar Economy and GrabBike Economy which offer further discounts at different times of day so that a user, no matter what their spending power, still has access to ride-hailing services that meet their budgetary needs. On food delivery, similarly, I talked before about our co-funding scheme with merchant partners that is a very significant machine of ours that helps to continuously offer value to our users. But beyond that, we have other new schemes. We've launched our Grab Unlimited subscription plan which actually unlocks platform-wide benefits and discounts to users who participate, so that we drive higher frequency and loyalty across all services over time. And we're soon launching what we call the Saver delivery fee. Essentially, you'll have three delivery time windows that you can choose from depending on your willingness to wait versus willingness to pay. So if you want the fastest possible delivery, you can now elect to order a priority delivery. If you're willing to wait but you want deeper discounts, which is as high as 20% below our standard delivery fees which are in the middle, you can choose the Saver option. The fourth pillar for us, which really underscores everything we do, is our social impact. The way that I think about social impact is actually it's our day-to-day business first and foremost, because as I mentioned before, it's always about how to empower more driver partners, how do we get more merchants online. But beyond that, we enhance it further. We focus on training our driver partners, we give better tools to merchant partners so that they can get online and then they can choose to grow if they want to. They can buy self-service ads, they can join these co-funding programs as well. And then we do other things to serve the community as well. We work with different ministries on Grab Connect, which helps connect farmers to consumers on the Grab app. We help to build bridges in rural areas to help people move around in mountainous areas especially during monsoon season. And the last point there is there's a big focus now on sustainability, and that's growing importance to us as well. Grab has initiatives to help users buy a carbon offset if they book a Grab ride. They can elect to not have cutlery delivered to them with GrabFood. And at the scale of the number of orders that we do with GrabFood, that actually has an impact. And lastly, I think this one's very interesting and a hot topic in the market right now: piloting EV programs as well, because that's something I'm personally very interested in.

We think there's a significant opportunity, and especially with a footprint like ours in terms of the number of drivers that are on the road, the number of kilometers that they put on the road, we must focus on this and we will continue to build a focus. But as you say, in Vietnam in particular, the market is still very new. We're waiting to see more charging infrastructure being developed, we're waiting to see more affordable options come to market. And that's not us specifically, but driver partners. They're price sensitive, they may be reluctant to change if they're not sure of what the long-term value might be, especially when they've already invested in an asset like their existing car. So that work is going to take time. In the meantime, we are already running pilots so that we can understand the value of EV, understand the challenges that driver partners face today with current EVs available, and that way we can use that as a feedback loop for the partners that we work with and eventually to help to convince driver partners to get on the wagon and start to shift to EV. So it's very early days. We're very committed to building that strategy over time, but we need to do that in parallel with the development of the EV ecosystem in the market, which I'm really excited about because I'm sure it will happen. And I'm very happy for Grab to participate in sharing some of the learnings that we have from other countries where we have seen some very rapid development and helping to bring that into the market in Vietnam as well.

We've been partnering with a local startup for our Grab Express business already since December. I'm very open to partnership. I think there's only benefit to be gained by us and partners joining forces to make sure that we can unlock that value and reduce our carbon footprint. So watch this space.

I'd say affordability is definitely a key one, and that's easier said than done because balancing a marketplace where each different user group has their own sometimes conflicting needs from the other users. A consumer wants lower fares, a driver partner wants more earnings. How do you actually take those two problems and find the solution that benefits all, helps grow the platform, helps grow earnings for driver partners? So I think that that affordability push is going to be a big focus, but it's not an easy one. We have to find better ways to become efficient, to reduce the inefficiencies of the platform. And I think that applies not just to us but to the entire market as well. So that's a really significant trend that we see. If you think about the inefficiencies that we try and solve for, I think a really good example of that is when we first launched GrabFood, a driver partner when you order your meal would have to essentially see what you ordered, go to the restaurant, show them what you ordered, wait for them to cook the food, and then bring it back to you. That's hugely inefficient. There was a lot of waiting time that the driver had to spend at the store, especially at a busy time of day where there might be a queue of people offline as well trying to order. And we had to pay for that actually, we had to compensate them and subsidize that for them. So as you eliminate those inefficiencies and you help them better utilize their time, you can also rationalize your spend and your investment as well. So I think that will be another key focus.

I would say again, outside of the capital cities, Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, there's still a lot of potential there. But the true wave of new untapped potential is sitting outside of these cities. And luckily, users are becoming more aware of our services. For example, for us last year alone, we saw 140% year-on-year growth in our expansion markets alone, which shows that the traction is building and will start to snowball. We have to have simpler solutions, even more focused on affordability, and we have to spend time on the ground understanding them, sharing with them, and trying to convince them so that they can try, see for themselves, and then stay on board. So I wouldn't call that a trend, but I think you should expect to see that try and grow over the coming years.

Absolutely, good. Spread the word, please.

We're all doing our part. We're very focused on executing on the ground. However, as far as I know, part of for both users and partners, and I can say this is happening in the Vietnam market. So do you think that it is an opportunity for Grab to go ahead to the break-even, or maybe it will be a disadvantage for you?

Thank you so much as well.

Thank you all. Nice to meet you.